


Science & Superstition

by TheoMiller



Category: Supernatural, Warehouse 13
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-08
Updated: 2014-05-08
Packaged: 2018-01-24 01:51:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1587257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheoMiller/pseuds/TheoMiller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To hunters, knick-knacks that pick up mysterious properties based on the circumstances surrounding them are called cursed objects to be destroyed, unenchanted, and/or buried. To Warehouse agents, they're artefacts to be snagged, bagged, and tagged. Same difference.</p><p>(OR, The One Where Dean Winchester Goes To A Gay Bar With A Human Lie Detector)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Science & Superstition

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is dedicated to Kelly, who's been following me for, like, forever and has put up with five months of me procrastinating on this bloody thing. She's great, go follow her at kitawolf12.tumblr.com, she is a 100% quality multifandom reblogger.

“Eight people died of textbook cyanide poisoning without a trace of cyanide in their bodies,” Sam said. “All within the same town, in a week of each other. They’re dropping like flies. It almost seems like they’re imitating the death of another.”

“So, you thinking cursed object?” Dean asked.

With a sigh, Sam shut the lid to his laptop. “Yeah, must be. Want to go get the curse box out of the trunk, make sure it’s handy?”

“Yep. Hey, what do you want to grab to eat? There’s a Ruby Tuesday down the street.”

Sam squawked and nearly tipped out of his chair. “Uh. No, no, thanks, I’m good – wasn’t there a cheeseburger joint? Cheeseburgers, cheeseburgers sound good, let’s just swing by real fast and grab some?”

“Oookay,” Dean said, blinking at him. “Freak.”

When he was gone, Sam groaned and covered his face with his hands. “God, I have issues,” he mumbled.

 _Meanwhile_ :

“Ping!” Claudia called over her shoulder.

Steve grabbed his blazer and shrugged it on. “Where are we heading?” He asked. “Is it warm?”

“Warmer than here,” Claudia said, “And that’s all that matters. ARTIE! Steve and I got a ping, we’re going to Virginia!”

Artie stuck his head out of the side room. “Make sure you check in with me _regularly_ , and don’t take any unnecessary risks, got it? Myka and Pete are going to be tied up in Oregon for a while longer.”

“Kinky,” Claudia deadpanned. Artie threw a pen at her, and they left, chuckling.

 _Several hours later_ :

“Hey, Artie, we’re about to enter the crime scene. Yeah, yeah, I’m wearing the suit, see? It’s like a freaking funeral up in here.”

Steve leaned towards her. “Nine people are dead, Claudia, funeral attire would be appropriate.”

“Shush your face,” Claudia said. “We gotta go, Artie. Talk to you in a bit.” She closed the Farnsworth and rolled her eyes.

“You know, I don’t think Artie would approve of the turquoise waistcoat, should I ask him?” Steve continued, grinning.

She elbowed him, and the cop who approached them paused for a second. Then, “So… you guys are with the Secret Service?”

“Yep,” Claudia said. “We think this might be a biochemical weapon and we like to investigate that sort of terrorist attack, you know. So, are those men in suits the head detectives?”

Steve followed her gaze to the two extremely attractive men talking to another cop.

“No, they’re FBI. Didn’t they contact you?”

Claudia shrugged. “There’s some dick measuring that goes on between the FBI and the Secret Service, they like trying to out-solve us.”

The cop blinked. “Okay, well, uh, go ahead in.” He lifted the crime scene tape and they ducked under it.

“Dick measuring?” Steve hissed.

“Like you wouldn’t like to do some dick measuring with those two,” Claudia said, waggling her eyebrows. “Agents! I’m Agent Donovan, this is Agent Jinks, we’re with the Secret Service.”

The shorter of the two cleared his throat. “I’m Agent Rogers, this is Agent Romanoff. FBI. How can we help you?”

“Well, you can stop lying about who you are,” Steve said levelly.

Sam and Dean exchanged furtive glances and pulled them away from the bustle of the crime scene. “Look, buddy, I don’t know who you think you are, but—” Dean began.

“Come on, dude, your names are an Avengers reference,” Claudia said.

“This is why I tell you not to do themed aliases,” Sam growled. “Okay, we’re… undercover agents from a—”

“Lie.”

Claudia grinned as Sam and Dean went fishing for a new story. “He’s sort of psychic, don’t even.”

“Psychic isn’t a _precise_ —”

“—oh, come on—”

“—an awareness of tells—”

“—what else could you call Leena other—”

“This is why inner office romances don’t work out,” Dean interrupted.

“He doesn’t swing my way. Get your facts straight,” Claudia said, and then snickered. “ _Straight_ , see what I did there?”

“You’re worse than Pete. Look, you two. Get off of our crime scene, or we’ll tell them you’re lying and get you arrested.”

“Dean,” Sam said quietly. “Let’s just tell him.”

Dean sighed. “Okay. I’ll level with you, gay psychic secret agent man. I’m Dean, this is my brother Sam, we’re monster hunters and we’re pretty sure a cursed object is causing people to relive, or, uh, re-die the death of the person who owned the object. That _truthful_ enough for you?”

“Thank you,” Steve said, exasperated.

“No freakin’ way, that’s true? _Awesome_!”

Sam sighed. “Can we just look into this case before more people start dying?”

X-x-X-x-X

“All I’m saying is that _Love, Actually_ is a movie where Bilbo Baggins, Snape, Valjean, the dude from Notting Hill, Nanny McPhee, Elizabeth Swann, the creepy psychic kid from when the Doctor turned himself into a human, Mr Darcy, and Rick Grimes do a bunch of random shit, that’s not a Christmas movie, that’s a casting grab bag,” Claudia said.

“You know what else is a grab bag?” Sam said, with somewhat forced patience, having sat through Claudia, Steve, and Dean arguing about Christmas movies for the past half-hour, flipping through the case files. “Our vics. I mean, different ages and race and income…”

“Maybe it’s a jury,” Steve said.

“Nope,” Claudia said, “I ran the names through a database on the way here. I got nothing.”

Dean took one and frowned. “They all unmarried?”

“Yeah,” said Sam, “Dating service, maybe?”

The Farnsworth squawked, and Claudia held up a finger to shush them and turned away. Sam googled local dating sites and found only one of the men, who was on a poorly designed website for gay men to meet other gay men in the area. Steve, who was leaning over Sam’s shoulder, pulled the laptop away and started looking the victims up on facebook.

He quickly navigated to the About page on each of them, and Sam pointed wordlessly at the “interested in” section of the first. “Bisexual,” said Jinks, quietly, and Dean’s head jerked up. “What?” he said.

“So, get this,” Sam said, and turned the laptop around. “All of our vics? Openly gay, bi, or lesbian.”

“Gay bar!” Claudia piped up, sounding inordinately excited, and then cleared her throat and turned her attention back to the Farnsworth. “Not you, Artie. Jinksie. What? No, it’s for the case.”

“Huh,” said Sam, impressed by the idea.

Steve tapped “gay bar” into Google maps, and sure enough, a result cropped up right in town. “Tell Artie we know where, just not what.”

“Did you hear that?” Claudia asked.

“Yes, I’m not deaf,” said Artie, irritable. “Did you hear what I said about Jonestown?”

“Don’t drink the kool-aid, yep, got it. I’ll talk to you later, I need to explain the possibilities and make the Winchesters look a little less butch.”

“What?!” Dean said, only to be shushed by Claudia, who took over the laptop and pulled up the Warehouse database.

“All right, so, Artie said we’re on the lookout for Jonestown and Holocaust stuff most especially, since those are the biggest cyanide deaths. Also, y’know, things that might have belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Hitler. Oh, and Cold War stuff. He said something about Tylenol bottles, but apparently he’s pretty sure we have most of those back in storage at the Warehouse. So! Everyone got that? Good, because you three need makeovers.”

Twenty minutes later saw Sam and Dean in tight shirts and their nicest jeans. Steve firmly insisted on remaining in his slacks and button down, but Claudia had wheedled him away from the tie and blazer and removed the first three buttons so he had to keep the top open.

Claudia, who had pulled bright blue leggings and a wide belt out of her luggage (even though Steve was pretty sure Artie had checked to make sure she only brought professional clothing this time because if they got kicked off a crime scene because Claudia was wearing a band tee and skinny jeans again, there was a fair chance that Artie would kill her), was wearing one of Sam’s huge plaid shirts like a tunic and surveying her work with pride.

“All right, that’s awesome. Let’s go.”

Which is how Dean ended up sitting at a table in the middle of gay bar, across from a gay secret agent who could tell when people were lying. Which was fine. Except that Dean’s life was built on lying, he _liked_ lying, lying was easy.

“We should probably talk,” Steve said. “Will you freak out if I flirt with you?”

“No,” said Dean too quickly, and then narrowed his eyes when Steve raised his eyebrows. “No,” he said again, and this time, the freaking Human Polygraph accepted it.

“Okay,” Steve said, and leaned forward. “So, tell me about hunting,” he said. It would’ve been a normal enough conversation starter, except he’d pitched his voice differently and was only speaking loud enough for Dean to hear, and Dean recognised his own method of chatting up girls in bars reflected back at him. Shit.

“Uh… Well, it’s really dangerous. I’ve died like a hundred times.”

Steve nodded, even as he said, “Wait, what do you mean?”

“I’ve been brought back to life a few times,” Dean admitted. “Sam too. We’re pretty used to it by now.  I’ve done the trifecta, actually – Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory.”

“You know, I’m pretty used to weird things being true, working at the Warehouse, but that’s…” he shook his head. “What about other religions? Like, have you been to Valhalla or Elysium?”

“Not yet,” Dean said, taking another drag of his beer and looking around the bar. No-one seemed to be watching them, with the exception of Sam and Claudia, who were taking turns chatting up the bartender of indiscriminate sex and gender and watching the dance floor and, by extension, Steve and Dean.

Steve was watching him intently. “No-one’s going to think you’re interested in me for a second. I’m gonna pretend to strike out, I think, and go talk to people, canvas the area, ask about vics. If anyone approaches you, be very careful, don’t touch anything they hand you.”

Dean nodded, and Steve half-grimaced and walked away. It took mere moments for someone to occupy the seat across from Dean, but it wasn’t a patron of the bar. “Hello, Dean,” Castiel said.

“Hey, Cass,” said Dean. “Not a good time.”

“Are you on a hunt?” Cass asked, looking around.

“Yeah. Cursed object. Got some weird secret agents helping out, one’s psychic.”

“I see. Well, this conversation can wait for your attention to be undivided.”

Before Dean could reply, the angel was gone. “Weirdo,” Dean muttered, and went back to his beer.

Despite several people hitting on Dean, including two women who appeared to be a couple looking for a threesome partner and a few people who could be any gender, no-one raised any red flags, and closing time was fast approaching.

Claudia was dragging Steve and Sam away from the bar, Sam by the hand and a rather alarmed Steve by the shirt, and nodded to Dean with a wink. “Hey,” she said, when they ‘bumped into each other’ on the way out. “Anything?”

“Nada,” said Dean.

“Who was the hottie with the tan coat and the smoulder?” she asked.

“Cass,” Dean said. “He’s a friend.”

She waggled her eyebrows in a way that reminded him disturbingly of Gabriel. “Friend-friend or friend-you-wanna-bang-friend?”

“Dude,” he said, “he’s just a friend.”

Dean brushed past them and stopped to talk to someone who was handing out fliers for some pride event.

Claudia glanced at Jinks. “So?” she said.

“What?” said Steve, somewhat guiltily.

“Was it a lie?” Claudia pressed. “C’mon, Jinksie, you know you want to announce truth or lie, you do basically nothing else, do I need to bring up the guitar incident?”

“It was a lie,” Steve said. “But you really shouldn’t forcibly out someone. Like, ever.” He fixed Claudia, and then Sam, with very intense stares until both nodded in agreement.

As they walked out into the night, Claudia held out a hand, and Sam gave her twenty dollars. Steve rolled his eyes. “Did you seriously bet on those two?”

“We bet on whether she could make him lie in front of you again,” Sam said, shaking his head. “Trust her to pick the one thing he never speaks his mind about.”

“I’m just that good,” Claudia said, and then Dean fell back into step with them, and she fell silent.

“Dean?” Sam said, when they passed under a streetlight.

Dean braced a hand on the light pole. “I don’t feel so good,” he admitted.

“What did you touch?” Steve said immediately, and then spotted the flyer on the ground. “Claudia, gloves and bag?”

She tossed him a pair of purple gloves and quickly opened the crinkly silver bag. “Don’t look!” she ordered Sam and Dean, and Sam turned his brother, who was now leaning pretty heavily on him, away. The tiny crackle of the page was sort of anticlimactic. “I don’t think that’s all of it,” she said, peering inside.

Steve spun around and spotted the man holding a stack of flyers made of the same paper. “Hey!” He said, and the guy dropped the paper and bolted. “Claudia!”

Claudia was already putting on a glove and kneeling to collect the pages, so he gave chase as he fumbled for his badge. “ATF!” He yelled, holding it up. Pedestrians scattered, but it wasn’t fast enough. The guy kept taking sharp turns, and he obviously knew the area better, which meant Steve would lose him pretty quickly.

The sound of a gun firing made him drop to the ground and look for his absent Tesla, even as he heard the suspect collapse to the pavement. He realised belatedly that the shooter was Sam, who jogged over to help him up before going and checking the guy’s pulse with a rather disturbing disinterest. “What the _hell_?” He said, following close behind.

“Sorry, Agent,” said Sam. “But he tried to kill Dean.”

“Is that what you do? _Kill_ all of the bad guys?” Steve said in absolute disbelief.

Sam glanced down at the body. “Pretty much?” he said. “Look, we usually deal with things that, if you don’t put a bullet in them, or whatever it takes to kill them, they eat you. Or possess you. Or sacrifice you. Or—look, he was a killer, okay? And he was going to get away… and hurt more people. People like you,” He said, more softly, and Jinks narrowed his eyes.

“That’s pretty underhanded.”

“Occupational hazard,” Sam said. “We do a lot of smooth-talking. Look, we’ll put the FBI rubber stamp on things – I’m thinking slinging around words like ‘biochemical weaponry’ and ‘hate crime’ will make it all seem very official – and the cops are already heading here. Don’t worry about it, we won’t complicate your job at all. Can I—uh, is Dean going to be all right?”

“Bagging artefacts stops their effects. I had a pretty similar brush with an artefact my first day in the field.”

Sam huffed in relief.

X-x-X-x-X

“So,” Claudia said to Dean, who was already well enough to devour a slice of ‘sympathy pie’ from a chick who’d flirted with Claudia in the bar, as they were sitting on the kerb watching Sam and Steve talk to the cops. “Your buddy Cass, he single?”

Dean very nearly choked on caramelised apple. Then, attempting to be casual, “He’s not really into the whole dating thing.”

“Jealous?” she asked.

“I’m not gay!”

“The answer to a question I never asked,” said Claudia, drily. “But, you know, since you checked out both me and Steve at the crime scene, I kinda figured ‘not gay’ out for myself.”

He glanced at her. “You’re pushing your luck,” he said.

“Story of my life,” she said, patting him on the back, and went to stand up.

Dean grabbed her arm. “Wait. Uh, you got a normal phone, besides that weird box?”

“Yeah,” said Claudia.

He held out a hand, and she gave him her mobile. “I’m gonna put all of our numbers in here. If we don’t answer after you’ve called all of them and it’s been a week, feel free to start looking, but we’re probably dead. Give us a few months, we’ll probably be back.”

“Oookay…” Claudia said, waiting for Dean to finish punching in keys. “You know what? I’m gonna go find the chick with the pie. Lemme know when you’re done writing all the digits of pi.”

“Pun unintentional?”

She paused and turned around. “Yep. Guess you could say it was… _punintentional_.”

“Go away,” Dean said. “Seriously, get the hell out of here, that was awful.”

X-x-X-x-X

“What are they, anyway?” Steve asked, looking over Artie’s shoulder.

Artie swatted at him. “Stop hovering. Uhh…” he squinted at the writing. “Looks like Alan Turing’s handwriting.”

“Wait, _what_?” said Claudia.

“Yeah, we’ve got some of his stuff here… Yeah, that’s Turing’s handwriting under the printing for the pride parade. He probably wrote these when he was already considering suicide…”

Steve looked at Claudia. “That’s messed up,” she said. “Like, I hate to say it, but it’s probably a good thing Sam shot that dude. Don’t give me that look!” She said to Artie, who just glared more.

“You get filing duty,” he said judicially.

She groaned and made a grabby hand toward Artie. “Gimme the murder flyers."

"Classy, Claudia, classy," said Steve.

 

_finis_

**Author's Note:**

> I've literally written bits and pieces of this sporadically for months, so if it seems a little disarticulated, that's because it totally is.


End file.
